Winter’s flattened out the garden. The view outside the window is tidy and discreet. Spring promises new enchantments with 180 more bulbs planted, but they sleep underground with the roots and worms and seeds of next year. Right now, I’m left with the fond memories of Fall and her voluptuous decay.

At this moment, I feel Fall is my favourite season. All the perennials reach their prime and begin to collapse. Seeds scatter and fluff and hang onto skeletal branches in dimming light. Over-ripe veggies beg for roasting. Frost blanches the green leaves black. Squirrels become obese in their compulsive harvest, tumbling across the fences and trees. All the beauty and fullness of Summer now needs to unbutton, to spill over, to free her hair and toss it around, to take off her bra and flop relaxed and haggard onto an overstuffed chair. Fall looks in the mirror and sees the small changes that cannot allow her to deny death. Then she laughs.

Death and hope in the garden is one thing. Fall’s mess makes compost. Leaves feed the soil. Life and death appear visible in tandem on a rosebush. Zinnias bloom, make seed, grow and die all on the branches of one plant. The impossible yet obvious interconnectedness of birth and death stare back from the garden and say, Duh! Individuality is a myth. Find a better story and tell it. Unbutton yourself. Let go.

And for all that wisdom, I’m a terrible individualistic person and can’t stand chaos, especially when it comes to office supplies. But allow me this indulgence as I listen to the Fall garden. Allow me to exhale in the presence of this sloppy scattered grandmother, and listen to her tale fraught with absurdity and paradox. Later I’ll get to work and turn the compost, rake the leaves, prune an evergreen into a perfect little globe and pick some red mustard for supper. But for now, let’s laugh at the mirror, because death just means more things will grow when winter’s over.

“As soon as the ground can be worked:” can there be a more exciting phrase found on a seed packet? Can’t you just smell the clean fresh dirt in these words?

“As soon as the ground can be worked:” as soon as the earth below you becomes unfrozen, as soon as her flesh responds with pliancy, as soon as she yields instead of resists, as soon as winter’s cold shoulder melts a little under the tutelage of lengthening days, you can sow some early seeds in the garden.

The sun seduces the earth. Even though it’s thirty degrees in the morning, the sun warms the ground all day long. The ground holds the sun’s warmth, and loses her sheen of frost as summer saunters in, roses in hand. The early seeds like peas and broccoli (and I might try parsley and kale) don’t need high soil temperatures to germinate and don’t mind a little frost or snow. Legend says you should sow your peas on St. Patrick’s Day. I say you should have a good relationship with your soil and wait for her to tell you when she’s ready.

Luck and happenstance played a huge role in laying out my garden when it was new; I didn’t know anything about botany or agriculture. The fencerow along the walkway to the garage seemed sunny so I planted vegetables there. Each year the veggie row grew longer and now spans the whole walk. Every morning and afternoon and evening when I traverse this path to come and go from errands and work, I walk the full length of the veggie garden. I know all of her moods. I know her little hills and valleys, her caches of perennial and self-sowing herbs, her weedy spots where the catnip seeds started, and her rocky spots where nothing grows unless it just wants to. I know where some carrots are still frozen into the ground from last season. I know where corn mache, salad and cilantro overwintered. I know where I let some cherry tomatoes fall in hopes the seeds would sprout this year. I know where I’ve unearthed aggressive perennials too big for this space, where I fought cthulu-like asparagus roots and wheedling invasive raspberry sets to the death.

I walk with the garden every day, and I know her intimately. I came home from work last night, and she said she’s ready. The frost and snow have almost completely melted. Her sunniest spot seems to be giving me that come hither look. The dirt is dark and moist under the mulch of fall’s chopped leaves. But when I searched my seed packets for peas, I found none. How did I forget to save some seeds or buy new peas? Surely I had too many seeds last year and didn’t plant them all? Like a Casanova without a condom, I leave the soil unplundered until tomorrow.

As soon as the ground can be workedI will come to you, my love.You will know me by my trowelBy my steel-toed bootsAnd my stake. I will be gentle.When you yield, I yield also.A small trench, no deeperI will carve into your breast.There I will hide my seedsAnd there you will work your mystery.The fruit will grow fat in the sun.Fall’s furrows will leave tracesThat once we loved, and once we bore fruit.

Tunneling my way to the back door after another deluge of snow today, I witnessed a strange phenomenon.

I looked at the sky, and saw not only azure, and clouds, but an almost supernatural glow beyond the trees. What could this unreal brilliance in the sky be? Could I be dreaming, I wondered? Why is it still light out after five o’clock? Dare I risk jinxing my good fortune by speaking the words out loud?

I think I saw sunlight.

Yes, it’s true.

I will welcome spring with wide open arms after surviving this winter. The snow was and is unbelievably deep, the temperatures have been unthinkably low, and the whole season long I’ve been catless and cuddleless. Winter was darker than ever this year, and I am ready to worship the sun.

The lesson the earth teaches every year as the seasons change is that nothing lasts. This is a reason to celebrate and a reason to mourn. Terrible things will pass. Good things will end. Life and death does a dance; can little humans like us keep up the pace with a cosmic paradox?

Winter pounded the lessons in this year. What else can one do, but acquiesce to winter’s severe tutelage the same way a branch bends to survive the accumulating weight of the snow? Learning to bend prevents a complete break, and breaking one branch prevents the death of the whole tree. Seasonal transitions are times for sacrifice.

I agree with Aleister Crowley that “sacrifice is a wrong idea,” especially sacrifice along the lines of New Testament mythology and the cult of martyrdom. Being a martyr is wasteful and utterly narcissistic. The best and brightest of us should make our light shine, not throw it away. The connection between martyrdom and codependence looked obvious to me growing up as I watched women “sacrifice” for alcoholic and abusive men. Those women were held up as examples of good. That’s okay: I’ll take bad. Ya’ll go ahead and feel holy, and I’ll be out here happily not sacrificing myself for anyone or anything, living a life I choose with a partner I love in a relationship where giving goes both ways.

But sacrifice in its ancient sense means to make a thing sacred, and in our ancestors’ world this often meant killing it. A tree is felled to burn for heat in the winter. An animal is slaughtered to feed a community. Crops are reaped so their seeds may be sown. Sacrifice means killing something with intention.

If your soul were a garden would you hesitate to weed it? If your mind were an orchard, would you go years without pruning? If your ego were a veggie patch, would you never sow new seeds? Would you let the lettuce grow tall and bitter, the beets become woody and inedible, the tomatoes and cucumbers rotten on the vine? If one tended a garden the way we too often tend ourselves, the garden would be stable-but completely unproductive. Killing with intention keeps the garden-and your soul, if such a thing exists-growing and changing and producing its bounty.

Nothing lasts. Winter is almost over. Now is a good time to take stock of what needs to die. Eventually, everything will die. Let the celebration begin.

I awoke on the underside of a leaf. Sunlight filtering through the sheath of my egg roused me. All was blurred. I could barely move. I shifted. As I moved my body, it suddenly screamed its message: HUNGER!

I writhed in panic as need exploded in every section of me. The egg gave way, and I burst into the terrible daylight, my jaw seeking something – anything – to devour. My home, the leaf, was my first meal.

Other instars from my brood surrounded me, and we feasted together, marching upwards from leaf to leaf as we left nothing but bare stems behind. Our greed was unchecked; this was our birthright, to eat the rosebush, to skeletonize her branches. We were on a mission. We needed to fatten up, shed our skins, emerge larger, fatten up again, emerge again; on and on until we could pupate in the welcoming soil at the foot of our beloved rose.

You see we loved her. She was the source of our sustenance, and no other leaves nearby had the right chemical scent. We knew we couldn’t eat them. We could only feast on our sweet rose. What choice did we have? Starve to preserve her? Or flourish and see her defoliated, trusting she would leaf out next spring? There was no choice, really. We ate and ate.

One dull day when I hung languid and full on the edge of a decimated leaf ready to reach my next instar, shadows passed over me and the rose shook. I don’t mean she swayed in the breeze or sagged from a heavy rain; I mean she shook like an earthquake vibrating from her very core. I reared up with my brothers in a defensive S posture. We stood together, leaf by leaf (or what was left of them), ready to defend our rose.

I heard voices.

“Oh gross. Look at all of them!”

“Well, crap.”

We held our position, still as ninja. We were many; they were only two. Our forces outnumbered them exponentially.

“Eww, don’t touch them! Can’t you just knock them off with a stick?”

A heavy pinkish thing swooped in from the air above, plucking and pinching my brother on the edge of the leaf. He clung bravely with his prolegs, resisting attack. He held on valiantly, even as I saw his soft body sag in the monster’s clasping tentacles. He wiggled in a last fit of bold resistance. The monster gave one sharp tug and unceremoniously threw him onto the ground. My brother lay curled in a tight circle, expiring. I trembled.

“Well, that’s no good. They’ll just crawl back up there.”

“Why don’t you get me a glass of water, with a little soap in it? That’ll kill them.”

“Don’t you want gloves? You don’t want to touch them, do you?”

“Just get the water please.”

“Okay, hold on.”

Once a brief respite ended, the full onslaught began. How can I describe the horror as one by one we were mercilessly torn from our rose and plunged to our deaths, drowned like so many tiny Ophelia with no rosemary for remembrance, no prince to grieve our passing? We were drowned after watching our brothers be drowned, a torture almost worse than the end itself. With no wings to fly, no stingers to poison, and no voices to scream, we watched our own massacre, helpless and silent.

Drowning feels like breathing glass. You are not gently lulled like a lobster in a pot. You do not fall asleep. Every millimeter of your insides is shredded by shards of pain as oxygen is replaced by a thousand pins and cuts. You want to black out; you should be dead by now. You have certainly stopped breathing.

“Well, I guess we should throw them in the compost.”

“Yeah, they won’t be able to get back here.”

“Do you think they’re dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh well. Doesn’t matter.”

Overwhelmed by nausea, swirling and sloshing in sticky liquid, and consumed by the black, hot pain of agonizingly slow death, we were cast into a dark pit.

The smell of the rose had always been so sweet. We had known her chemical signature from before our birth, and her fragrance had always been the center of our world. Now we writhed in a steaming hole full of molding banana peels, rotting wood, pungent citrus remains and spent coffee grounds. We choked on the smell of ammonia. We cringed at the sight of unnameable clumps of what may have been vegetation or something else entirely. We saw nothing we could eat, and the temperature seemed to be rising with remorseless fury. All we could smell now was filth.

Thankfully, this hell ended swiftly for most of us, soft-bodied as we were. Innumerable predators from every direction checked the taste of our tender bodies, and found it to their liking. Those of us who lasted longer, wounded, succumbed to bacterial and fungal assault before starvation. In all cases, death was quick.

Now that I am dead, I am bemused by my own continuing existence. I don’t know what I am, but I know I am still in the hell-pit by the aromas and the heat. My self feels less like a self every day; sometimes I feel dispersed throughout the pit, large like an over-inflated balloon and small like the invisible grain of sand within that will suddenly pop it. I feel none of the pain of my colony’s massacre or my own suffering and death. I feel a different pain I am at odds with myself to comprehend. I feel my heart will break, because the world around me is so vast. I feel I will cry forever, because this world has made me part of it. I feel lost, yet ubiquitous. I feel-

The pit is moving again, one of the many routine upheavals that break my train of thought, tossing my barely-grasped ideas into thin air and scattering all meaning to the wind. So be it. With every upheaval, the fragrance subtly changes and improves. Today, this place smells wholesome and familiar. It seems to smell like home.

I am somewhere else now, in the sun. I remember a sort of journey, feeling spread on the ground like a grave and then brought back to life through osmosis. I feel I have gone inside of time to travel through it. I decide to relax a little more, to open.

“Oh look, honey!”

‘Well I’ll be damned. It’s going to make it.”

I have always been the rose. These monsters with their blunt tentacles now caress me, bring their faces close in wonder, and praise my bloom. They treat me as an honored guest when once upon a time they treated me as their sworn adversary. Those who once attacked me now cherish and protect me.

We are still in the same garden. We are still the same creatures. We still worship the same fragrance, as we always have. In this moment before the next breeze billows my musings away like dust, I ask myself: what, and in which of us – if anything – has changed?

In the garden, it is possible to see the world full of all the wealth anyone could possibly desire.

What is wealth? Is it dollars in a bank account? No, that’s just commerce. Unfortunately, most people become sucked into the dollar-hoarding game at a young age, and continue exponentially increasing their need for more dollars by trying to “improve” their lives as they become more successful. As income increases, perceived needs increase. I’ve met many people with large incomes who have no free time and every dollar committed to the creditors before it’s even earned. It’s as though many people feel they can never have enough. Some very wealthy people operate from a poverty mentality, always seeing life out of balance.

In the garden, you can always have enough. Everything is equal, and you can make something out of nothing.

You can make food out of dirt, water, and seeds. You can make physical health from eating your own whole food, and you can make mental health out of sunshine. Then, you can make healthier soil out of the waste from the food and flowers you grow, so you can grow more! You can potentially close all the little leaks in your financial lifeboat and not worry about how to sink or swim. You can strive to be whole.

The garden demonstrates life as a circle instead of a hierarchy. There’s no ladder to climb, only seasons and inter-related systems that renew their own energy.

I’m nowhere near being self-sufficient and living sustainably, I’ll admit it. It seems to me an excellent goal to strive towards, though. Every time I close a little gap by eliminating some consumption or waste, I move closer to this goal. Recognizing consumption and waste, recognizing the “easy” things that end in dissatisfaction and recognizing what wealth really is requires awareness and honesty.

Wealth is time.

Giving up things creates more free time.

And free time in the garden is an opportunity to enter your own alternative universe.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading Shamanic Gardening, because the author says over and over to give thanks. For a bitter crusty woman like me, giving thanks sticks in my craw (only bitter crusty women have craws, you know) because giving thanks implies a receiver of thanks. So who would that receiver be? I hate simple answers, and I’m telling you right now not to give me one. The powerful forces in the universe aren’t jealous patriarchs like Yahweh or progeny-cannibalizing Lotharios like Zeus. They are unnamable, impersonal, and without consciousness. They aren’t “they” and they don’t care if you give thanks.

But the cognitive change that takes place by the practice of giving thanks is the perfect antidote to poverty mentality. I don’t give thanks to any anthropomorphic character in my imagination. I’ve begun practicing looking at all my privileges, gifts, and good fortunes. This practice might seem laughable if you saw my kitchen ceiling, my handbag, or my paycheck. Or the leak in my basement. Or the absence of family photos on my wall. I could really go on and on about what I don’t have; most of us could. But looking at what you lack is like looking into an abyss, and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Better to look into the garden, where wealth is tangible.

The earth sustains human life. We’re part of the earth. We have everything we need. If you have anyone or anything in your life that you love, you have everything you need. Money might give you more time for what you love, but ultimately, focusing on the commerce of it all is a trap.

Ignore the money. Follow the love.

I have immense good fortune. I’m not supposed to be lucky; I’m a Firehorse. But today, tonight, the evening before Valentine’s Day, I am overcome with my bountiful good fortune.

I have a partner I can talk to about anything. Anything. I have a wealth of memories and experiences from my travels and experiments in life that rival any great novel. I haven’t tip-toed through life; I’ve gotten very dirty. I’ve survived without the things most people require for sustenance, kind of like a bromeliad or a succulent. Or maybe I’m just a weed. I have things and people I love deeply, although I wasn’t born to them. I have First World privileges. I have hot and cold running water. I have enough free time to write my nascent thoughts. I can read. I can draw. I can seduce and nurture and fight. I am incredibly rich.

Oh I have lost so much, and ruined so much. I could look at what I lack and forever fall into the abyss – couldn’t you?

Or I could choose to give thanks and see my riches in the compost, treasures in the trodden soil, wealth in the dirt I will return to when I die.

“Memories can be characterized by our physical surroundings. Basic features in a garden can be thoughtfully designed in a way that nurtures a sense of our deepest selves. Gardening in this type of environment is a daily confirmation of empowerment.”

–Melinda Joy Miller’s ShamanicGardening

“She approached just as Helen’s letter had described her, trailing noiselessly over the lawn, and there was actually a wisp of hay in her hands. She seemed not to belong to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it. One knew that she worshiped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her…assuredly she cared about her ancestors, and let them help her.”

–E.M. Forster’s HowardsEnd

I didn’t expect a book about spirituality in gardening to be published by Feral House/Process Media any more than I expected the shadow of Wiccan matriarchy to dominate a post-Victorian English novel written over a century ago. Yet these are the surprises I found in books this winter.

After thumbing through shelves of technical books about gardening and science, it’s a pleasure to open a book about emotional gardening. ShamanicGardening shows how to garden with intention, and speaks to the heart of why some people love gardening:

“A garden is ripe with opportunities to surround yourself with symbols that connect to your sense of well-being and the manifestation of personal goals. The garden can be used as a tool for your life to flourish. Your garden can offer the opportunity to create a paradise that literally and figuratively can feed, protect, and heal.”

Why do we garden? Because it’s magic. Yep.

ShamanicGardening’s layout is visually friendly, and its short chapters and detailed lists of plants, herbs, and companions never overwhelm the eye. Miller reminds us in every moment to give thanks to our garden, plants and ancestors. She describes beneficial attributes of plants, colors, objects and flowers in the garden, and gives specific instructions on their traditional uses in healing and personal growth. Her own faith in these things is apparent, and as a skeptic I feel chagrined by my crusty, critical soul. I don’t trust flower essences to cure any disease, and drinking colored water seems impotently wacky. My complaint with spells and rituals has always been that they “practicalize” the poetry right out of the event. Forced to choose between magic and poetry, I will always pick poetry. (The magic’s in there if you look closely enough.)

Despite its complex subject, ShamanicGardening takes an introductory tone in its text. Touching on several different disciplines, the author treads very lightly and leaves no deep footprints. As a novice to Feng Shui, I learned a few new ideas to play with in the garden, and was delighted to discover my compost bins are in the wealth area! Intuitively I think that’s a very positive thing, although it’s not addressed in the book. I suppose I could learn from the author’s knowledge of herbal and plant remedies, if only I lived in a tribe where someone else would harvest the Echinacea root when I’m sick. I read this book with a miserable cold while looking out the window at a veritable field of snow-covered coneflowers. Again, I’m cynical and need to work on all that “love is everywhere” and “all is one” kind of stuff. This book didn’t excavate my cynicism deep enough to give me feelings of thankfulness and oneness. But maybe it’s just all the snow.

Perhaps the author deliberately keeps her tone simple in ShamanicGardening to remain accessible to the broadest number of readers. Or does she truly view the world as clear, uncomplicated, and benign? One feels Miller must have experienced chthonic insights given her combination of Native American and Buddhist training, yet as a teacher she chooses to keep her text straightforward and plain. I could have handled more philosophy, more oomph. It seems she leaves too many of the important things unsaid.

A narrator more than willing to say everything and dish about every detail tells the fictional story of HowardsEnd. Yet again, one feels the real story has not been told in the words on the page. This is what fascinates me about HowardsEnd, a type of novel I would normally never bother wasting my time on as a fan of non-fiction, science fiction, and experimental fiction. I rarely want to sit down and read a book about a bunch of mundane people doing things I might do in my everyday life, like buy shoes or fall in love. Yawn. Usually, I want to be surprised and shocked by a book.

HowardsEnd did neither of these things. I read it because my husband is working on writing fiction and has a huge collection of The Greatest Books in the World, and because I’m trying to catch up with him. We talk about books all the time; it’s a delight to be married to someone you can have a private non-stop book club with! And it’s an incredible treat to see a work of fiction constructed from the inside out; there are so many things the non-writer like me would never think of, like different characters having different voices, and backstories of great intimacy known only to the writer that never appear in the text.

HowardsEnd has backstory in every character. It’s also a novel about the specific era in an industrialized country’s history when the past is being erased by modernity, and urban/suburban lifestyles begin displacing rural tradition. There are lots of people and events, plotting twists and turns, sociocultural issues editorialized, dilemmas of inequality raised, questions of sexism, exploitation, and infidelity explored, and at the end you stop reading and go…hey, wait a minute, what just happened?

Because the real story is that of a woman in love with a garden bequeathing it to an almost total stranger, and that (spiritual?) contract being honored despite every person and event in the visible world striving to prevent it. It seems to be a story about women’s lineage, and that lineage following the line intended by the ancestor, no matter what. The ancestor in this story is not a blood relative, and not really much of a friend; she’s a rather tiresome middle-aged woman who recognizes something in the younger woman. (Other ancestors older than she are hinted at.) The older woman chooses that younger woman over her own children to inherit responsibility for tending her sacred place after her death.

Women, like men, feel compelled to bequeath their lineage – perhaps women more so than men since women are expected to give up their own names if they partner with a man. Having no children or all sons or angry daughters who don’t give a shit frustrates this need to pass along one’s feminine line. But chin up ladies! HowardsEnd is the story of the line persisting by some unseen force of its own; it is the story of a garden getting the steward it wants, and of the ancestors we may have forgotten exercising their power. It tells of undervalued land outliving and overcoming human trivialities through the power of land itself. It is a story of the magic and the deeper world we hardly recognize from day to day, except when we take time to smell the snow or feel the wind.

Thus two vastly divergent books make perfect companions: one is chatty and vivacious, the other simple and meditative. Both are in their own way about the wordless wisdom of gardening, feeling part of the earth and the soil you were made from. Any gardener, male or female, is part of this lineage when they start getting dirt on their hands.

Oddly, HowardsEnd seems to do something ShamanicGardening does not: it looks fiercely at the unspoken contracts humans have with each other and the land we inhabit. For me, the central image of HowardsEnd is Leonard Bast’s trek into the woods. Leonard is a small man. His opportunities truncate his aspirations. He allows physical poverty to poison his mind and destroy him. But every now and then, he hears a calling, and responds. One day, he goes into the woods. He walks all night. He comes back changed, and becomes the fertilizing force and the human sacrifice that gives the land at HowardsEnd its future caretaker.

Perhaps Melinda Joy Miller is wiser than she lets on. She espouses thankfulness, and the honoring of ancestors, and treading very lightly on the ground of the earth which sustains us; and if Nature is a beast who demands the occasional human sacrifice, perhaps we would do best to follow her example and keep secret things secret, and tread lightly as well.

How I admire the trees when they lose all ornamentation and stand stripped bare for the winter. I’d like to have that kind of strength when I get old, and not depend upon pretense for beauty.

Stark branches speak to many people of melancholy, but to me they speak of hope. The raw canopy of black veins against blue sky is mirrored underground by a network of roots. Trees can survive losing one third of their branches above ground because the real heart of the tree is hidden in the soil. When a woody plant looks dead, give it a little time. It may show signs of life in spring.

Fall is my favorite planting time, especially for woody plants. Many of my deciduous shrubs were dead sticks when I brought them home, and now they flourish. Garden stores reduce prices by 50% to 75% in the fall because the plants look terrible. If you know what plant you’re seeking or want to take a chance on something new, you can get a shrub almost for free.

This time of year any branches you’ve layered can be dug up and replanted to start new shrubs completely for free. I’ve accidentally layered many shrubs. Real gardeners do it on purpose. The technique is simply to bury part of a low-lying branch until it grows its own roots. You leave the end of the branch above the soil, first wounding the spot on the branch where you want roots to grow, and weight it down with a rock or something. Many months later, you get a free shrub. I didn’t do any of this; the branches layered themselves, and I now have Limelight hydrangea, Little Henry, and Diablo Ninebark to replant.

Fall is my favorite time to move and increase perennials. Perennials get dug up, roots divided, and plants put in better places. Sometimes I just dig up half the plant and leave the other half in the ground if it is in a good place. I’m not very careful about dividing. In fact I’m a clod. That’s why I divide mostly in the fall. Everything looks dead anyway, so the sad little divisions fit right in to the overall wilted, sagging look of the fall garden.

Also I move plants around capriciously. I like to think they enjoy the adventure of mobility. It must be like a carnival ride for them, getting moved, like riding a roller coaster. Very exciting. Fall is often rainy, and despite cold temperatures above ground, plants keep growing roots below ground where it’s warmer. They don’t need to put energy into making leaves or flowers, so all the energy goes into making roots for a good strong established plant before the demands of spring begin taxing them.

Planting in fall can be more relaxed and haphazard than in the spring. In spring, everything has to look good because there are people who just buy all those perfect cookie cutter annuals and make those of us who are actually growing plants look bad. In the fall, I can slap some divisions and baby shrubs in the ground, and any mess I make will get covered by leaves twenty minutes later. Awesome.

Sloppy gardening habits probably benefit plants more than delicate precision. New starts get to keep a clump of the old soil their parent plant was happy in, and leaves, leaves, everywhere leaves to tuck the plants in and make them cozy and well-fed. I keep all my leaves for mulch and compost. When I see the sere branches of the exposed trees, I see the old grandmothers of the garden, giving all those leaves year after year to help the younger, smaller plants grow up and thrive.

This fall marks one full year of absolutely no chemicals or fertilizers or pesticides in my yard. My shitty organic lawn is in fact no longer totally shitty. It’s quite green. It’s nice. Sure I’m a little anxious for spring and seeds and flowers, but I’m trying to stay present appreciating age and decay and leaves, and my lovely, green, weed-filled lawn.

On the eastside of Detroit, there’s a neighborhood art installation piece built (and rebuilt) over decades called The Heidelberg Project. Tyree Guyton grew up in Detroit, and instead of succumbing to the soul-crushing urban decay in the neighborhood, he created this work which has taken on a life of its own, growing like a garden playground over the whole city block. Many other people, especially neighborhood children, have helped create it.

One of the neighbors told me Guyton is in Switzerland now, awarded an honorary doctorate. I tried to get her to tell me how she felt about living in the middle of all this; I know what people in my neighborhood would say! She was infinitely discreet and said she was proud of Guyton’s success, and people have come from all over the world to visit, so she lets them sign her house.

All of the materials are found objects, and they remain outdoors in rain and snow despite not being made of durable materials. Rotting stuffed animals nailed to a tree fade in the sun. Shopping carts perched impossibly high on the tree rust. Paint flakes off of panels, wood openly rots, nothing is pretending to permanence here; it is all on the move towards disassembly.

The sight of all this deconstruction in the fall season suggests mourning. The discarded objects and abandoned houses have their own ghosts.

A cracked, headless concrete angel wears a barbed wire crown of thorns as a necklace. The word “god” is painted everywhere, as though the demiurge himself could be conjured by a Masonite panel or a broken television screen. Contorted metal veins seek relief from massive syringes. Doors fold in upon one another forming a trap. Feral cats stalk the garden mice.

Growing up in poverty is a burden most people cannot overcome. Imagine as a child not knowing if you will eat today, and imagine how physically dangerous and emotionally demoralizing undernourishment could be. Imagine how much fear you would carry, every moment of every day, if people got shot in your neighborhood. Imagine you’ve seen family and friends die from an overdose. Imagine you know people who cannot afford medical treatment, so they slowly waste away or die suddenly between ER visits. Would you pick up a paint can, and make big bright polka dots on your house? Would you create a folk art monument?

Responding to an impossible world with humor, joy, and intelligence seems like a great act of will. The Heidelberg Project crystallizes all the problems of the city using its own refuse as the medium. Protest and social commentary infuse the battered crosses and melting roofs, raising the questions of the city: where are the police? What happened to primary care? Is war a family value?

The work also raises questions about the value of material objects in America, satirizing our national hoarding disorder and our irresponsible love of the new.

How much stuff can we buy and throw away? Where does it all go? Why do we run from what is old instead of repurposing and rebuilding it? Why do we abandon houses, people, and pets? Urban decay is not really a problem of the city. Urban decay is a problem of the whole culture, with the city exhibiting the most obvious symptoms of the disease of living unsustainably.

Heidelberg is more than one man’s work, an ongoing community project that says children silenced by poverty can have a voice. Everyone can participate; everyone can make art. You don’t need to have a gallery or a patron. You can start doing it right now, where you are, out on the street.

(Please note, my personal photos posted here may not be reproduced for any commercial purposes because The Heidelberg Project and Detroit Industrial Gallery are both copyright protected.)

Today, very late in the summer season, I would like to express my appreciation and profound gratitude to all of the terrifying creatures who make gardening without chemicals possible.

(Forced, nervous smile) Without you, dear beneficial insects, pesticides would lead to a perpetuating downward spiral of increasingly toxic strength, ultimately eliminating the weaker pests and culling out the strong to survive. Without you, I would have to handle and inhale these chemicals, or even ingest them in my food, and regardless of labels that advertise safety, my personal experience is that these “safe” chemicals cause itching, rash, and welts. Thanks to you, dear creepy beneficial insects, I no longer have to endure a pesticide pox.

So let’s show some love for the larvae! (Awkward, stilted hand clapping) Yeah, that’s right! Give it up for the Ladybug larvae! You awesome little dudes can eradicate aphids and asparagus beetles in no time flat. You’re actually kind of cute, the way you guys look like tiny little alligators running all over the fronds in a feeding frenzy. Just stop reproducing on my food, okay? Keep it real, but keep it on the foliage. That’s right, little dudes.

Black wasps! Hell yeah! I’m not sure if Giant Black Wasps are beneficial, but if they look like something Sigourney Weaver couldn’t kill after four blockbuster movies and three DVD’s of special features, I’m taking their side in any argument…(backing away, slowly)…gee, you wasps sure have pretty blue-ish black body segments and enormous wingspans…oh my, aren’t you pretty! Nice wasps! (Run!)

In closing, my deepest gratitude goes out to the invisible microbes who appear only in spirit, who appear only in sunshine as healthy flowers, robust chard, plump tomatoes, and everlasting eggplant. You invisible angels of flowers and fruit form a circle of light that has the strength of iron, the stability of stone, the beauty of fresh air. Without the unseen miracle of microbial balance, all gardens fall to ruin and become so much dust, so much desert. Let us always be mindful of the unseen beings who sustain our everyday life.

As a self-confessed, non-repentant mulch addict, I have fostered some strange weeds this season.

The twin causes of my folly are: Impatience and Recklessness. Impatience in that I never wait for compost to become fully composted, but spread it around when it is in that bardo state of not mulch and not compost. Recklessness in that I mulch the gardens with anything that might need cutting back or pruning, with slight forethought regarding its tendency to reseed. I will admit right here, I’m a bad gardener.

Being a bad gardener works for me because it expands the possibilities of what can and will grow. As long as I continue editing the chaos, the garden doesn’t look too bad. This is how the Pink garden looks when you lie in the grass:

If I were a good gardener and cleaned out all the organic material and seeds and leaves under the plants every year, I wouldn’t have my army of coneflowers marching towards victory in the Pink garden, or penstemon seedlings under the Newport plum tree. This year I would have no akashiso at all; my seeds from the store failed, but volunteers from last years’ batch thrived. Being bad has its benefits.

Three weird sisters have been the prominent weeds this year: dill, asparagus, and squash. I call them weeds despite their usefulness because each one has sprouted in an ungodly manner where it was never meant to grow.

Asparagus, the most unlikely suspect, has sprouted in every inch of the vegetable garden. Everything I read about asparagus says it is difficult to grow from seed. When the compost bins were full last fall and the asparagus fronds needed pruning, I chopped them into bits all over the rest of the garden. I avoided the asparagus patch so as to not attract asparagus beetle. The fronds made pretty feathery mulch. And now, seedlings with mad fat roots like tenacious clinging monsters sprout everywhere in my garden. Fortunately, they also sprout in the asparagus patch itself, insuring full recovery from the trauma of the fence installation this spring.

Squash surprised me. When I composted around the roses, these seedlings with big fat succulent looking leaves kept appearing overnight. After pulling a weed with the seed attached, I realized these were composted (or not composted) remnants of my fall window box decorations, aka, gourds and squash.

The squash seedlings may be freaky gourds, or they may be acorn squash. Hopefully I’ll find out in a few weeks because I planted some of the seedlings behind the garage and let one of the volunteers grow in a bare spot in the butterfly garden. If it’s acorn squash I’m totally pumped. I have this fantasy of building trellises up the side of the garage and growing squash vertically, a project I might not have had the guts to embark upon without free seedlings begging me to grow them. Thank you, unfinished compost!

Dill I don’t even want to talk about. It’s everywhere. Last year Eastern Black Swallowtails frequented my garden and my dill, and this year there are none. In fact, there are very few butterflies this year despite my focus on habitat and native plants. This makes me very sad. I allowed the dill to grow in select spaces to provide host plants for the swallowtails, but none have appeared.

To end on a happier note, I forgot to mention the asparagus growing out of the side of the slats of the compost bin. I don’t even know what to do about it. I tried to stir the compost and turn the seedlings into the pile, but they stayed put. I guess I will let them mature a while and then transplant into the garden. Or make another asparagus bed. I guess it’s up to the asparagus, not up to me. I’m just the gardener. The plants are running the show.